Do It Yourself Credit Repair

Bad Credit can really suck. With bad credit you can’t get any furniture for your apartment without being raped by Rent-A-Center, you can’t get a cell phone without putting down a whole paycheck for a security deposit, and you can’t even get a loan to buy that Caddy everyone should be driving. Bad credit costs money; everything is more expensive when your credit sucks. If you CAN get a car, it’s at 6 or 7 years old and you’re still paying a huge monthly note. Even jobs have the nerve to be running credit checks now a days. In this day and age, you must have good credit. Period.

So, how do you fix your credit if you know that it’s bad? How do you even know if your credit is bad or not? What exactly is considered bad? In this article, you will learn:

What a credit report is and who the 3 credit reporting agencies are
How to get a free copy of your credit report(s)
What a credit score is and why it matters
What a dispute is
How to remove items from your credit report with disputes

What is a credit report?

Everyone, from the time that they’re born has what is known as a credit report. We all start out with the same amount of information in our report; nothing. Everything we do that involves credit is stored in this file. Everytime we run a credit check, everytime we don’t pay a bill, everytime we get a credit card or a car or even a house or condo, it goes into this file. This file, this report basically just lists our entire credit history.

What is a credit reporting agency?

There are 3 companies that maintain your credit report. These companies, called Credit Reporting Agencies (or CRA’s) are Experian, Transunion, and Equifax. Each company keeps it’s own seperate copy of your credit report, and each copy has nothing to do with the other. So in effect, you actually have 3 different credit reports, not just one. Each report could have different things on them.

Whenever you get credit, it’s up to whoever gives you that credit to report it to the CRA’s. So, for example, if you’re late on your Tmobile bill, and Tmobile only reports it to only Transunion, then it won’t be on your Experian or Equifax report. So if you go to another phone place (say sprint) and they only check your Experian report, then they won’t even know that you never paid your Tmobile phone bill. Of course they will know if they check your Transunion phone bill.

How can I get a copy of my credit report?

There are a few ways to get a copy of your credit report. To get your report free, you can either visit annualcreditreport.com, or ask the CRA to give you a copy if you’ve been denied credit.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) requires each of the CRA’s to give you a copy of your credit report for free once per year. You can call them, mail them a letter, or (the easiest way) get your report online at annualcreditreport.com.

If you’ve been denied credit, you should receive a letter from whoever it is that turned you down with instructions on how to receive a free copy of your report. You usually have 30 days to ask for this copy.

What is a credit score, and why do I care?

In addition to your credit report, you also have what is called a credit score. This score is used to decide quickly how likely it is that you’ll pay a loan back. Although many places online will claim to give you your credit score, there’s only one real score, and that’s the FICO score. This is the score they use when you go to the dealer to buy a car, or when you try to get a cell phone and they need to find out whether or not you have to pay a deposit. Your FICO score is determined by what’s on your credit report. Once again, since you have 3 credit reports, you actually have 3 different FICO scores.

Every good thing on your credit report brings your score up. Credit cards paid on time, car loans paid ontime, etc; they all bring your score up. Bad things lower your score. If you don’t pay a bill and it shows up on your credit report, your score goes down. If you’re evicted, it’ll show up on your credit report, and lower your score. In some cities, if you don’t pay your tickets, they’ll show up on your credit report and lower your score.

Low scores can cost you alot of money. With low scores you have to pay more money for the loans you get and are forced to put down security deposits.

Remove bad items from your credit report with disputes

So, bad things on your credit report = low credit score. But can you remove these bad items from off your credit report? Yes, you can! Most bad things are put on your credit report by a collection agency. We all know that these are. They’re the idiots who call your phone constantly demanding their money. But collection agencies have laws they have to follow also.

Think about it like this, a stranger comes and knocks on your door, banging hard. When you answer, he says his name is ‘Pookey’ with Payup you dirty bastard, inc. He says you owe money on an old cellphone bill from Tmobile that you’ve never paid and he wants you to put the money that you owe in his hands or you’re going to have serious problems. What would you do?

Of course you’d have a few questions for him. Who are you? Can you show me some kind of proof that you were sent by Tmobile? Can you show me proof that the bill belongs to me? At that point, he’d either have to show you the proof you asked for, or leave you alone, right?

Well, it’s the same with collection agencies. They are infact strangers calling from strange companies asking you for money on bills they claim you owe, right? You are fully within your rights to ask for proof! The great thing about it is that if they cannot provide these proofs, they cannot try to collect any money from you. And here’s the important part; putting a bad item on your credit report is an attempt to collect money from you. So if they cannot prove certain things to you, they have to remove the item from your credit report.

So how do you ask for proof? There are a couple of ways. The simplest way is to dispute through the CRA. The CRA by law cannot report anything that is not true. So you have a right to request that the CRA investigate the truthfulness of anything on your credit report. When you do that, the CRA has 30 days to find out if it’s true or not. If it’s not, then they are required by law to remove it from your credit report. Simple as that.

You can also dispute an item on your report directly with the collection agency. You can send them a letter asking them to prove that the item belongs to you. You can request things like a signed contract that proves the account is actually yours. Of course most of the time the agency won’t have these things. Alot of the time, they’ll back off and remove the item from your credit report.

Removing items from your credit report can be very complicated and should be taken very seriously. But if you do your homework, you’ll find that you can probably remove every bad item from your report for just the cost of printing and mailing a few letters. You should definately do your homework though.

If you want to fix your credit quickly, and perhaps get that Caddy finally (I KNOW Cadillac is your favorite car, right?), then perhaps you should check out the Credit Secretes Bible. I love this system because it dumbs down credit repair so that anyone can do it. Using this system, I was able to go from a credit score of 460 to 640 in just 2 months! After that, I was able to buy my 1st real ride.

I’ve given you the game, now it’s up to you to Step Your Game Up.

mpruv.com aims to bring self improvement to the urban crowd.
Kingdom. High School dropout. Network Administrator. Pimp. Next…???